Due to the fast development of internet and wideband access network, various types of video services, such as download, video-on-demand, live broadcasting, etc., are enabled by employing Peer to Peer network (P2P for short) technology. However, current P2P system generally can only support a single type of service, for example, BT can only support download service, and PPlive can only support live broadcasting service. If a user wants to process more than one type of services, a plurality of client programs has to be installed, and a plurality of systems for supporting these services has to be set up by the service provider, which not only leads to high construction cost and inconvenience for subscriber usage, but also is disadvantageous to effectively utilize the video contents and client resources, thus the overall cost for providing P2P video service is increased.
Current P2P system has been proposed and established aiming at a particular service, and is not unified in view of media storage format, transmission format, transmission mechanism, and media source positioning mechanism, so one system can only provide one kind of service. However, a system which is able to provide various types of services has not been proposed so far.